Yidong Zhang

The winters of my childhood in Shandong were serious affairs.

Cold enough that I can still feel the chilblains — on my hands, on my feet, the skin tight and raw under the dim lamp. It itched. It burned. But that particular cold also taught me something I have not forgotten: what it means to endure, and to come out the other side still standing.

Growing up, I had no clear sense of how large the world was. The village ended at a dirt track, and that track led to another village. Books were rare. When I managed to borrow one, I would read it by oil lamp until my mother had called me to bed several times over. Looking back, I think it was those nights that planted something in me — a stubborn conviction that there must be more, somewhere beyond the track's end.

In 1989, I was admitted to Chongqing University.

I cycled to the county school to collect the acceptance letter and arrived back in the village after dark. The travelling cinema troupe was in — the kind that came to the countryside in those days — and the whole street was packed with people. I ended up behind the screen, watching the picture reversed and mirrored, and felt quite certain the film had been laid on in my honour. I was the first person from the village ever to sit a university entrance examination and pass. The previous Chinese New Year, six months before the exam, my father's friends had been drinking at the house and someone declared, in the high spirits of the evening: if Yidong gets in, we'll hire the cinema troupe to celebrate. The kind of toast people make. Perhaps no one truly expected it to come to that. No one from this village ever had.

In September 1989, I boarded a green-painted train to Chongqing. I pressed my face to the window and watched the landscape and the people go past — things I had never seen before. What I felt was not quite excitement. It was something closer to a premonition: my life was beginning to change.

After graduating, I stayed on as a lecturer. Classroom, dormitory, canteen — orderly, unhurried days. But something in me kept quietly shifting, like a needle that wouldn't settle.

When the opportunity came to go to Russia, I didn't think twice.

This was St. Petersburg in the mid-nineties. The Soviet Union had collapsed a few years earlier, and the city was still working out what it was now. Banknotes had climbed to one hundred thousand roubles — the largest denomination I have ever handled in my life. Outside the metro, a man had taken off his own winter coat and was selling it on the street, hoping to raise enough for a quarter-litre of vodka. A few blocks away on Nevsky Prospekt, the most expensive cars in the world were moving at speed. McDonald's had opened several branches. New supermarkets blazed with white neon light. The old world had gone. What the new world was, nobody could quite say. Everything was changing faster than it could be understood, faster, certainly, than anyone had time to grieve. The Neva moved through it all at its own unhurried pace, the blue water holding the Winter Palace's reflection as though none of this were especially remarkable.

Years later, after we had moved to England, I fell into conversation with a Russian family. It turned out both sisters had studied at St. Petersburg State Technical University — my university, my years. The world is remarkably small.

I returned to China in 1998.

Buildings were going up everywhere. Everyone was talking about the internet. I resigned from the university, went into business, and put together a modest living in IT. No great drama, no sudden reversals — just steady years, and a life that gradually filled out.

The thing I am most grateful for is watching the children grow up well.

My eldest son is nineteen. He is studying theology in England, a committed Catholic. A father from a village in rural Shandong, raising a son who reads scripture. I think about the distance between those two points sometimes, and I find it quietly extraordinary. My younger two boys are six. They move between Mandarin and English without pausing to think about it, run everywhere, laugh at full volume, and fill the house with a warmth that I suspect only small children know how to make.

In 2022, we moved to England and settled in Surrey.

Surrey announces its seasons properly: daffodils in spring, roses climbing every available surface in summer, chestnuts in autumn. Winter is not quiet — birds work through the bare branches all day, and the squirrel on the neighbour's garden wall goes about its business with tremendous application.

In 2025, AI entered my life.

It helps me think. It helps me build. Every half-formed idea I had been carrying around started becoming real. I became a Vibe Coder — and I find I like the honesty of that phrase. No pretence. Just a person with ideas and enough tools to act on them.

I am fifty-five. I watched the Soviet Union end. I watched China go from bicycles to bullet trains and become the world's manufacturer of electric cars. I walked my own family from a dirt track in Shandong to the green fields of Surrey. Now I am standing at the threshold of AI, looking around in several directions at once, curiosity still very much intact.

Under the stars of Surrey, I believe it for the first time: I can become anyone I choose to be.

This website is where I keep what I write. Notes on AI and making things, on life as an immigrant, on the years I spent living elsewhere, on the children, on whatever seems worth recording on a given day. I write slowly. I try to write honestly.

If you find yourself hesitating at some crossroads or other — do come in.